Anxiety is best mates with fear, and believe it or not fear is your friend. Fear is your informant; it tells you when you are out of alignment with knowing your own capacity for strength. Most of us ignore fear, as admitting to fear is admitting to our inability to cope. But without fear, you wouldn’t be able to break through limits and grow.
Anxiety is not your friend, but if we don’t listen to fear’s message and step up to life’s challenges, fear goes and gets its best mate anxiety, thinking two voices might get your attention. We then become paralysed with indecision.
Fear always gives way to grace, which moves you, when we listen to it. No matter how terrible the situation, grace is always waiting for us, like a boat on the side of the water, when the jetty is on fire.
When we seem like we are at a point of impasse, when everything feels impossible, we just need to hold. We might not know the way out, but when we listen to our fear and acknowledge it, then it gives way to hope. We start to hold for a resolution and in this hope, grace steps into the boxing ring and our obstacles no longer feel like blows. We hope for a grander purpose behind our troubles.
They say everything has a meaning. But I don’t believe it has, unless you turn every difficult thing you live through into a lesson you have grown in. Otherwise the pain of the difficulty grows through you, like the red in raspberry ripple ice-cream. Fear is your friend; don’t overcome it, but work with it as a student to a teacher.